


The House That Love Built

by whitchry9



Series: The Lost Son of Krypton and The Found Son of Hell's Kitchen [1]
Category: DC Cinematic Universe, DCU, Daredevil (TV), Man of Steel (2013)
Genre: AU, Adoption, Blind Character, Brothers, Friendship, Gen, Growing Up, Pre-Series, after adopting a space baby martha and jonathan think it can't get any harder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-19 01:16:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9411035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitchry9/pseuds/whitchry9
Summary: When Martha Kent finds out she's the only living relative of Matt Murdock, who was recently orphaned, they think nothing of adopting another child. After a space baby, things can only get easier.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt: http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/8773.html?thread=17596229#cmt17596229

Martha Kent receives a call from New York child protective services early one morning in September. Clark is still asleep and Jonathan is already out plowing the field.

At first she doesn't understand what she's being told, but then remembers her cousin, Margaret (Maggie, she always wanted to be called) who she didn't know that well, but had met when they were both younger. Apparently Maggie had a child who had recently been orphaned.

She was the only living relative.

 

When Clark is at school, she makes lunch for Jonathan and they talk it over. The boy is ten, only a few months younger than Clark. The social worker who called said that he was bright, devoted to his school work, and kind. She also mentioned, almost in passing, that Matthew was completely blind and had been for just over a year.

She tells Jonathan the entire thing before he says anything.

“Well,” he leans back in his chair. “It's not a baby in a spaceship, but it's still something.”

 

When he says that, she realizes there never was a choice to make at all.

 

That night while she makes dinner, Clark is sitting at the table nearby. “Clark?”

Clark looks up from where he's reading a book. “Yeah?”

“What do you think about having a brother?”

Clark's entire face lights up.

 

* * *

 

Matt arrives on a sunny Friday afternoon in September. He takes the social worker's arm and is led down the driveway to the house. Clark is practically vibrating with excitement on the porch, and Martha and Jonathan watch as Clark runs down to greet him- his new brother. Martha already knows she will love that boy just as much as she loves Clark, no matter where either of them came from, whether that be a spaceship or a city that might as well have been a world away.

 

* * *

 

It takes Matt nearly a month to stop calling them Mr and Mrs Kent. From there it's another year of stumbling over Martha and Jonathan. They don't want to force him to call them anything else, because they're acutely aware they're not his mother or father, and they certainly don't want to take the place of them.

 

(It's around the one year adoption anniversary that Matt calls her Ma instead of Martha, and she has to stop what she's doing for a minute and let it sink in.

It takes even longer for Jonathan to being anything but that, but she figures it's fair because Matt did have a father.

Jonathan becomes Pop around the time Matt graduates to grade 2 braille, and Martha never knew there was such a thing until Matt came into their lives.

Jonathan puffs up with pride and Martha starts to think she's going to have to deflate his ego with a pin.)

 

* * *

 

She never thought that Clark was lonely until she saw him with Matt, when she realized all at once that boys were meant to have brothers, especially on farms in Kansas.

Clark and Matt get on like a house on fire, and on one memorable occasion, do set the barn on fire. Clark got overexcited and accidentally ignited some of the hay, and then promptly put it out by blowing on it, with Matt none the wiser.

Or so he claimed. But Matt was not a stupid boy, and he and Clark had more in common than any of them first suspected.

 

* * *

 

Matt is eleven when the episodes start, when he curls in on himself in his bed, clutching his ears and begging for it to stop. It's the same thing that happened to Clark just a few years ago, except Matt is not an alien from a far away land, he's just a little boy.

Of course, someone would think the same thing if they just saw Clark, and hadn't seen where he'd come from.

She does the same things for Matt that she did for Clark, talks him through how to control it, use it, and eventually the two boys make a contest out of who can hear the farthest. Clark almost always wins, but not by much. She's not sure why Matt has such fantastic senses, and she's not sure she ever will.

(Sometimes, Matt has nightmares, and on one such occasion, crawls into bed with them. “I can still feel it burn,” he whispers into the dark, and Martha realizes that she never really knew how Matt was blinded. She doesn't ask if that's when things started to get louder, closer, harsher, because she doesn't need to.)

 

It's not easy having two exceptional children, but no one ever said that being a mother would be easy, and Martha walked into motherhood knowing full well that there was no handbook for the things she might have to do.

 

When Clark is thirteen, Matt bursts into the house crying for her, yanking her out the door and into the yard, where Clark is clinging to one of the top branches of their big maple tree. At first Martha thinks he's about to fall, but it's just the opposite- he's about to fly.

That's one thing she hopes she never has to go through with Matt.

 

Clark wears ankle weights for the next month until they're sure they won't lose him to the wide open Kansas skies.

 

Both of the boys seems to recognize that the other isn't normal either. This doesn't seem to bother either of them. Clark learns braille and Matt learns how to run through a corn field without any fear. They spent weekends in a tent in the backyard and the summer they both turn twelve they try to build a tree fort. Jonathan has to fix their work every night for fear the boards will fall down around them the next day.

 

* * *

 

 

When Matt is thirteen, a man shows up at their door. He wears glasses and carries a cane like Matt's. Martha assumes he is also blind. What she doesn't know is what he's doing there.

The man says he's there to help. Martha tells him they're doing just fine, that both of her sons are doing well in school, and that if he would please leave before she got her shotgun out.

Stick huffs and leaves. No one is ever sure how he found them.

 

* * *

 

Matt is different from Clark, of course. They are both their own person. Sometimes it frightens Martha how angry Matt can be, but she remembers that he lost his sight and his father in the same year, and then was taken from the only city he ever knew and transplanted into the middle of nowhere, Kansas. Jonathan teaches the boy to box, like his father did, and there are some days where Matt hits things in order to feel better. That's fine. She's proud that he recognizes that's what he needs.

 

Clark goes from being an only child to being an older brother. They worry at first how he'll react to having someone else in their lives, let alone someone who might need more attention. They really shouldn't have, because Clark is fiercely defensive of what Matt can't do and even more defensive of what he can, insisting to his parents that Matt doesn't need his hand held to the bus stop at the end of their driveway. There is more than one fight in the school yard where Martha is called to pick up both her boys, Matt with a split lip and Clark with a split knuckle. They both refuse to say what happened, but Martha knows well enough. They're sent to bed early, but without any malice.

 

* * *

 

They are both fourteen when they both almost lose a father for a second time. (Martha assumes that Clark had a father before, and has lost him. She knows that Matt has.)

They found out early on that Matt could sense tornadoes before they happened, something about the air pressure. When Matt wakes up on a car ride and tells them they need to get home, Jonathan speeds for what might be only the second time in his life.

The tornado misses them by minutes, and Martha hugs both of them extra tight that night.

 

* * *

 

Their interests branch out as they go to high school. Matt finds he likes debate, which is no surprise to anyone who knows him, since the boy would argue with anyone, including himself. Clark finds he likes writing, and joins the school newspaper.

 

They both have girlfriends, but none of them last very long, such as it is in high school.

(When they were thirteen, Jonathan sat them down for The Talk. A banana was involved, so Matt could have hands on experience. She's not sure who blushed the hardest, but she was pretty sure it was Jonathan.)

 

Clark, who grew up driving the tractor, gets his license the day he turns sixteen. Matt has also had a fair amount of experience with the farm truck, but doesn't get to do the same. Instead he gets a refreshable braille display for his birthday, and he cries with how happy it makes him. Up until then, he'd had to make do with resources the school provided, which were mainly braille books nearly as big as him, or someone to read text to him. With the braille display, the entire world is accessible to him, which is all Martha could ever want for him.

 

They both have dates to prom and Martha gets a picture of all four of them, her and all three of her boys. Both Clark and Matt are the picture of civility, corsages for their dates, holding doors open, and that night she cries over dinner and she realizes that they're both growing up so fast.

 

In their last year at high school, they both apply to college. They apply in Kansas, of course, but what she doesn't know at the time is that they both apply in New York as well. Matt wants to go back to the city where he was born, where he was blinded, where he lost his father, and Clark, well, Martha thinks Clark just wants to follow Matt. (The boy has also never been outside of Kansas, except for the time he was in space, so she thinks he might also want to see the big city, and she can't blame him for that.)

 

In the end, Matt goes to Columbia for political science, with the hopes of getting into law school there afterwards, and Clark goes to NYU for journalism.

 

The day after they leave she cries herself to sleep. The house is too empty.

 

* * *

 

The good thing is, Clark flies them home every weekend for dinner, Matt clinging to his back for dear life. (If Matt ever wondered if this was what it was like to have a brother, he never said anything.)

She fusses over them every single time, asks them if they're eating enough, if they're making friends, how their classes are going.

Four years go by like that. They both graduate. Matt gets into Columbia law and Clark gets a job at a newspaper.

She pretends she doesn't know about the reports of a man in a cape flying around New York and saving people, but when the costume gets thrown in with the rest of Clark's laundry, well, Martha can hardly say she was snooping. Serves that boy right for bringing his laundry home on weekends. He is a grown man.

She tells him to be careful, and he tells her he's bulletproof, and Martha does not want to know how he found that out, not at all.

She tells him to look after Matt, in a whisper they both know he can probably hear, despite being all the way out in the barn with Jonathan.

Clark promises he'll do his best, and that's all a mother can ask for.

In law school, Matt gets a best friend and a girlfriend, in that order, and one is far better for him than the other. The girlfriend goes, the best friend stays, and the year after they live together again. Clark spends what little free time he has saving people in New York and across the country, sometimes even around the world. It exhausts her just to think about.

 

Matt graduates summa cum laude from law school, and Martha doesn't know what that means other than it makes her cry, and at graduation she finally gets to meet the best friend Matt has spent so much time with. Foggy is a lovely young man, even if his name is a bit funny, and she can think of no one else she would rather have Matt start a law firm with.

 

New York seems to acquire superheroes the way other cities acquire celebrities, and maybe that's what superheroes were to New York, who knew, but there's one that catches her eye, only because she is a mother and she knows how to recognize her children when they're on tv and in trouble.

She calls up Clark as soon as she sees the news, tells him to get over to Matt's place and bring him home so she can give him a talking to.

 

Maybe one of her sons is bulletproof, but the other isn't, and he needs better armour.

Martha Kent didn't raise no fool, and she will not have him dressing like one.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate titles that didn't make the cut and instead just killed me, courtesy of onmyworlditmeanshope:  
> Kent Family Farm (And Home for Lost Superheroes)  
> I Can't Be Matt Kent, It Ruins The Alliteration: A Daredevil Fic  
> MARTHA PLEASE STOP BRINGING THESE BABY SUPERHEROES HOME: A Daredevil Fic  
> The Blind Leading The Heat Visioned  
> Brothers in Farms  
> The Lost Son of Krypton and The Found Son of Hell's Kitchen  
> Anything You Can Hear I Can Hear Better  
> Two Brothers, Both Alike In Alliteration, In Fair Smallville Where We Lay Our Scene


End file.
